Kill You Again

Chapter Two

Joe Lockwood stood at the crime scene and felt his dinner trying to make a return journey. The scene was a bloody mess. The dead man was bound very tightly to a straight-backed wooden chair and his innards lay at his feet. A deep cut ran across his throat, and his right eye was in his lap, covered in blood and what could only be vomit. The walls of the room were covered in blood too; one side adorned with the tell-tale arterial spray that must have followed the coup de grace. Lockwood didn't understand how the man had had any blood left over for the arterial spray after what was done to him.

This was the worst scene that Lockwood had ever been to, and he regretted accepting the assignment with such excitement. He wouldn't be able to eat for a while- or sleep without having nightmares.

Lockwood turned to his partner, Ayesha Raman. She was staring at the dead man with cool impassivity, her eyes flicking to each mutilated part in succession. She didn't look perturbed by the scene at all, and Lockwood silently envied her strong stomach.

"What do you think?" he asked her, hoping for some sort of reaction. Her stoic expression was starting to unnerve him.

She sighed and straightened up, "I think that these guys are really in a bad place with caseloads if they decided to call us for help."

Lockwood and Ayesha were the new detectives on the force, and they were often assigned to the most mundane cases- house robberies, car thefts... This was the first real case they had been given, and Ayesha even suspected that they had only been given the case because all the other detectives were already busy with cases of their own. The two of them were probably the only ones available. Rosetown PD was often called in to cover homicides in their two neighbouring towns, Wolfspyre and Silverton, as both towns had small police departments, tragically understaffed and unequipped. Both towns were notoriously known for their alarmingly high crime rate, and thus, Rosetown PD always had its hands full with the outside cases.

"This is our first murder case though. What do you think?"

Ayesha frowned, a little crease forming between her eyebrows. She analysed the scene, looking for clues, trying to avoid the sickening tug in her gut. Ayesha stood tall and lean in her form fitting pant suit, and looked like a force to be reckoned with. Her straight black hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail and her black eyes were piercing. She had learned quickly that in order to avoid snorts of amusement whenever she stepped onto a crime scene, she had to show people just how hardcore she could be. She had started to hide all her feelings when her sister disappeared, and she wasn't about to look shaken on a crime scene.

"This took a while," she said, "See how he's tied to the chair so tightly? The killer didn't want him moving around. He was cut up pretty badly- arms and then his face. I can't be sure if he was alive when his eye was gouged out or when his stomach was mutilated. But what's clear is that the cut to his jugular is what killed him. Nobody would have survived after that."

Lockwood nodded, taking in the information and silently admiring Ayesha. She was a natural at her job- her only inhibitions were her age, and the somewhat male-dominated workplace. She was just starting, and already she had picked up the skills that even experienced cops had yet to discover. Ayesha was the youngest woman to ever become a detective in the Rosetown Police Department, and many had believed that it was because of her friendship with the mayor's son. But all doubts were cleared when, during her first week, she busted a gang that was involved in a string of unsolved robberies. She gained the respect of the force, but to those outside the force, Ayesha didn't seem like someone who should be taken seriously.

"This seems almost angry, doesn't it?"

Lockwood had allowed his mind to drift to a better place but was snapped out of it as he heard Ayesha's voice, "What?"